James Forman Jr. was born on June 22, 1967. He graduated from Brown University and Yale Law School. He was a law clerk for Judge William Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor of the United States Supreme Court. Afterward, Forman worked for six years at the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C.
In 1997, he and David Domenici started the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school for school dropouts and youth who had previously been arrested. Forman taught at Georgetown Law from 2003 to 2011 and then joined the Yale Law School faculty. His first book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, received the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2018.
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